Online web applications have been developed which have the ability for a number of users, potentially at physically remote locations relative to one another, to easily collaborate, create and modify documents. Documents created by such web applications typically have media content including text, pictures, embedded audio and video, and other rich media and interactive content. These documents can be displayed to users via multimedia web pages on web browsers.
One problem with the use of such technologies, however, is that sightless users who wish to view documents with multimedia content are limited by the capabilities in existing screen reader software to read the updated content. Screen readers improve the readability of content on web pages by reading web page text in a linear, top-to-bottom fashion, outputting this content as audio to the user. Screen readers currently in use, however, cannot extract web page from multimedia documents in an efficient manner while still maintaining the fidelity of the multimedia.
There is no existing technology that has readily enabled users of screen readers or other software assistance programs to view such multimedia documents.